Kitchen Garden Forum

Do other members remove the lower leaves of tomato plants? If so, when? Should they be removed only if they are shading the fruit?

coincidentally I just watched a video clip on this subject here:

http://www.vegetablegardener.com/item/6 ... ato-plants

Not sure that I am ready to follow the advice yet myself as it would involve removing a lot of lower stalks and not leaving much else, but I might remove the first couple of branches during the week (especially since I had a severe case of blight last year).

cheers,

Fraser

Thanks Bunuel, it all seems very straight forward. I'll be out with the secateurs later in the week!

We remove our bottom leaves and have already done so. This is to try and avoid getting water on the leaves when watering and to try and reduce humidity around the plant to try to avoid blight.

Note the repeated use of the word 'try'.

My Tomatoes have baby fruit on so is it OK
to do this now?

As I am also always on the look out for blight
this would make it so much easier to spray if
blight was predicted.

Westi

Hi,
I remove the leaves up to the first truss and when that ripens on to the next so by the end of summer all looking rather bare. I always understood it helped to get the sun onto the fruit.
Hilary

I don't remove any foliage until the crop is well advanced, usually after I've picked the first truss. I remove the leaves when the sun's starting to get a bit weaker and days shorter, to hasten the remaining (by then hopefully fully-formed) crop to ripen. At this time of the year, with them growing like the clappers, all that lovely foliage helps them to develop.

I usually only remove the lower leaves towards the end of August after picking the first truss to allow the sun to ripen all the plants on the vine. However, because of space restrictions I tend to plant my tomatoes very close together and sometimes cut out all or part of the odd leave further up if they overlap too much so that the sun doesn't shade the tomatoes too much as they ripen.

Felix and Primrose give the traditional advice. But the idea of removing the lower leaves earlier, given the reasoning behind it, has its appeal. I suppose it may be a question of how open the base of the plant is to sunlight. I'll give both methods a whirl.

mike